UNIVERSITY OF DENVER CASE STUDY
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Schooled in Excellence
Ranked in the top 100 in the nation for its academics by the U.S. News and World Report, the University of Denver serves more than 11,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The school offers programs ranging from business to music, and social work to international studies, plus an active, thriving lifestyle on a pristine campus in the heart of Denver.
Overview
DU came to Malenke | Barnhart for help updating the top tier pages of DU.edu to reflect the school’s new brand and improve the user experience. The team wanted the site to express the “feeling of DU,” capture the essence of the new brand pillars, and improve access to information for the site’s main audiences: prospective students and their influencers. This would be the first step in ultimately unifying the navigation, look and feel, and content across the entire website.
Challenge
DU challenged Malenke | Barnhart to:
- Create a new voice and visual design that stand out from other university sites and convey the core values of the new brand.
- Design the content and architecture so that information seekers can find their desired content quickly and easily.
- Freshen up the look and feel to appeal to 18-year-olds while keeping it authentic to the university’s century-old character.
- Meet the needs of a wide range of internal and external audiences.
- Provide templates and online guidelines to enable them to bring the rest of the colleges, departments and institutes into the new look and feel.
- Launch within 4 months.
Solution
Through successful collaboration with a number of university groups, Malenke | Barnhart created a new website that:
- Features a dramatic new home page with design, imagery and copy that support the university’s new brand pillars.
- Replaces the existing top tier pages with close to 50 newly architected, written and designed pages.
- Consolidates all university news into one easy-to-navigate section.
- Gives site visitors two ways to navigate the site: By who they are and by what they want to learn or do, dramatically enhancing the user experience.
- Offers a new user-generated content tool for current students.
Upshot
The first step in updating and unifying up to a million pages on DU.edu, the redesigned portion of the site launched on September 14, 2009, the first day of school for students. It offers streamlined navigation and spotlights the university’s new brand, capturing DU’s vision to be a leading private university dedicated to the public good.
Additional Projects
After www.du.edu launched, we completed a number of additional projects for the university:
- School of Engineering and Computer Science redesign.
- Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics redesign.
- Admissions and Financial Aid Department redesign.
- DU News microsite redesign and development.
- High-profile video showcasing the university’s new brand.
- New version of the school fight song.